ACROSS the street, the kids played pickup basketball at Macombs Dam Park, a couple of youth league baseball teams getting after each other. Jamal Kuwan, 15 years old and owning “next” on the basketball court, who lives about six blocks away from Yankee Stadium and wore a throwback Nets jersey with Jason Kidd’s number on it, looked puzzled as he pointed toward the neighboring ballyard.

“Who’re the Yankees playing today?” he asked. “The Red Sox?”

Around the corner, at The Bat, a boyfriend talked frantically into his phone, trying to veer his girlfriend to the most popular baseball meeting spot in New York. He rolled his eyes a couple of times. “I know they play every year,” the boyfriend said, “but it’s still important . . . yes . . . yes . . . trust me on this . . . It’s important . . . IT’S IMPORTANT . . . you see The Bat? . . . You see me? . . . OK, good . . .”

Welcome to the magic of The Subway Series, Year Seven.

Once, New Yorkers spent fair chunks of the summer dreaming about days like this one: two teams, two games, two boroughs, two stadiums. Once, they would fill their conversations with what-ifs and how-abouts and who-knows, wondering what it would be like for the young Seaver to face the old Mantle in a game that counted, or for Dwight Gooden and Don Mattingly to hook up for four at-bats in the summer of 1986, when both of them were young, at the peak of their powers, on certain parallel paths to the Hall of Fame.

Hell, only last year, half the city wanted to put a contract out on Roger Clemens, and the other half wanted to nominate Shawn Estes for Wimp of the New Century for dusting Clemens’ rear end when most folks had a little different target in mind.

Now?

Now everything is played. The Subway Series has become a Top 40 song that DJs grind into your mind, time and time again, until just hearing the opening notes drives you to the edge of your sanity.

Nobody is discounting that the Subway Series idea was a good one once, that the thought of Mets and Yankees meeting in games that count was a delicious one too tempting to bypass. If you grew up a Yankees fan in the late ’60s and early ’70s, how great would it have been to see Horace Clarke and Gene Michael and the boys have a go at those uppity Miracle Mets? If you were a Mets fan in 1978, wouldn’t it have been pure heaven to watch Joel Youngblood take Ron Guidry deep?

That was the way we all figured it. Only, what we have now is exactly what we had then. One good team. One lousy team. And what seems like an endless string of dull, dreadful baseball games. Yes, they still fill the ballparks with people. Not the point. They no longer fill the ballparks with buzz. And the hole is glaring. The 2000 World Series is partly at fault, of course, reminding everyone what a true, pure, real Subway Series is really all about.

But even yesterday’s bi-borough bonanza contributes to the rapid obsolescence of this event. Remember 2000? Remember the first time we had a Bronx-Queens exacta? New York City practically stood still at the prospect. In some ways, that one day packed even more drama than any single day of the World Series that followed, especially since Roger Clemens nearly killed Mike Piazza that night.

Yet now, even that can’t stand alone in our memories. Now we’ve had two one-of-a-kind day-night dreamfests in the city. How could this measure up? Clemens looked like Walter Johnson against the overmatched Mets lineup. Neighborhood kids had no idea who was in town.